fbpx
Skip to content Skip to footer
Menu
Bali Feature
I Ate Ice Cream at Bali’s Biggest Rubbish Dump
I notice the wildlife before the people. Between the hoards of holy cows and scavengers of the sky, there’s fierce competition for edible waste. I’m ankle deep in rubbish before I notice nimble fingers combing through the dump. This is Suwung, the largest official landfill site in Bali—a 44-hectare cleared plot of land. Once a…
March 4, 2021
Story
The Overnight Train To The North Pole
If you were to find yourself in streets of Helsinki in the midst of a Finnish winter, don’t be surprised by a shower of snow falling gently from the sky without a moment’s notice. Following a successful thrift of (definitely) ugly Christmas sweaters and a tipsy game of Cards Against Humanity in a nearby pub,…
December 25, 2020
Japan Story
The Writer’s Routine
Six o’clock. Greeting her in the dim light, the mirror on the far wall can only fit a proportionate view of her features. It is small and inornate, but she can see a pair of eyes and ears, a nose and lips. She is a writer, but nobody the likes of Virginia Woolf stares back…
November 17, 2020
Story
The Day I Fell in Love With a Flat Earther
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. We were drinking champagne from the bottle, wearing only bathrobes in the suite of a 19th-century estate turned hotel two hours south of London. As the alcohol and dopamine coursed through my system, I managed to dig up a fact I’d heard in a science podcast months earlier:…
November 10, 2020
Story
Counting the Minutes
Nothing symbolises Western society – particularly, its notion of time as a commodity for sale – better than the taxi driver’s meter. As a child, I watched them with a morbid fascination. Seeing the price rise before my eyes with each passing moment was anxiety-inducing, painful almost, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from…
August 10, 2020
India Story
The Halloween Puja
I’m going to be a boxer. I walk to town and ask my tailor to make me a baby blue bathrobe with a hood. This requires a fair amount of pantomiming and gesturing. Then I ask him to make me a pair of red boxing gloves. “Boxing gloves?” asks Rajesh. He sends a boy out…
July 27, 2020

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.